I think this article invokes a bit of cognitive dissonance and a sense of repulsion in readers, by categorising friends in groups. And from my experience the largest group in my life appears to be "Sociable acquaintances". Kind of lowest quality friends. I assume lot of people are similar. They know lot of people and think that they have lots of friends, but when meaning of "friend" gets picked apart it appears that they might have only couple of real friends or even sadder when none. This realisation might bring rejection to the idea that the articles discusses or even trying to find flaws why the article is wrong. I found the article well written and interesting.
The article reflects well many aspects of western life experience and might be poorly applicable in other contexts. The text shows signals of it when associating certain kinds of relationships to be more prevalent in certain social-economics classes.
Having no friends usually is associated with sadness but some people actually associate it with determination and ambition as “friends” are distractions. If you only have acquaintances, an alternative grouping might provide a better framework to explain and reason about it.
The overall model provided is a good starting point but seems to assume some general human kindness that might be far from real. Interactions might be faked on one or both sides, relationships usually are not symmetric, people have a difficult time adjusting their interpretation of the real world accordingly to the inputs they receive, and so on.
I usually do not use the word friend for people that I mostly interact because of a shared hobby nor for social acquaintances, but I understand that they fit the authors definition.
In practice the text has more value if you replace “friends” with “people you interact with” and if you add a “none of the above” category. Which does not diminish the value of the article in any way.
> Having no friends usually is associated with sadness but some people actually associate it with determination and ambition as “friends” are distractions.
Just a few years ago (5-10), it was popular in tech circles to claim basically "I am hard worker because I did solitary hobby instead of socializing in school". Quite a lot of tech guys in my generations were effectively pushing that as ideology - socializing is waste of time for lazy people. You know, the true programmer is coding during christmas eve kind of meme (which was a thing in the past).
Now days, the same circles talk about loneliness (and sometimes blame lack of traditional values for it).
If there's one thing I've learned from playing single player games, then trying out online PVP in those same games, it's that teaming with (and competing against) other people is essential in improving your own performance past a certain level.
Well it does have an assignment on Christmas Eve naturally. The only time I did AoC that was the day I skipped since honestly it's super low priority compared to cooking/arranging with the family.
I too found the Machiavellian deconstruction distasteful at times. But
it's a useful lens. Like all such categorical psychology - personality
types and whatnot - it's a blunt utility, one that may even rally
"experimental evidence" to its support, but ultimately is elegant
observation of and in its time.
To be fair, the author acknowledges most of that. The etymology was
interesting. Less so the intersection with "class" which is a weak
sociological concept in my opinion.
Ultimately I felt it was a cold analysis though. He struggles with
defining love other than a coincidence of four types plus sex, which I
think misses about 90% of what love is, including fancies and fevers
brought on by sunshine and hormones and quite opaque to reason.
There is something odd in reading any account of the passions that
attempts to be dispassionate.
While he mentions how some bonds mat break down, the types are mainly
presented as static, missing any discussion of events and shared
experiences that shape relationships, for example; military service
where a bunch of random dudes you accidently cohabit, hang-out and
take the piss with, quickly turn into brothers you'd die for and spend
the rest of your life drinking with.
For me, the writings of Erich Fromm offer wonderful and coherent
insights..Particularly those that move love from something that
'happens to us' to something we're responsible for.
"big", "fast", and "heavy" all mean different things to programmers, train engineers, rocket designers, and astronomers, but they all still manage to quantify things.
If I love someone, I find them interesting, I feel bad when they feel bad, I want to spend time around them and get one-on-one attention from them, especially physical attention. That's at least half a definition for one person.
> "Big", "fast", and "heavy" all mean different things to programmers, train engineers, rocket designers, and astronomers, but they all still manage to quantify things.
Love is none of those things though and it's not measurable. What would the units be?
Half a definition is about as close as you'll get but it's the other half you'll never pin down. To paraphrase a cheesy film, you could spend your whole life trying and fail but it still wouldn't be a wasted life.
The article is written like notes, and seems to mainly be about expositing sociological theory, not giving life advice. So I would forgive it the somewhat cold tone. How such information is applied in real life will depend on each person's individual needs.
Friends that don't create unnecessary drama in my life are the only friends I aim to maintain, and I work at making that reciprocal. There are very few, we don't necessarily catch up often (and neither do we need to), but it's always natural, no pretense, when we get together. (I'm happy to hear about their life dramas, so long as they're not unnecessary - which cuts down the drama list by a good 90-95%)
There are "work friends" who I may really enjoy the company of, and will probably miss when I or they leave the shared employer, but life gets in the way of keeping too large an entourage; if it's unmanageable then it won't be managed, aside from if they'd fit into the first category.
There are "pity / polite friends" who, when we're sharing a location I'll happily talk to them because they're good people and don't deserve being ignored, but I do not and will not seek them out any other time. These "friends" usually exist in a different place on the bell curve than I do (both up and down).
I don't (think I) make friends of utility, not even because it's wrong to use people, but because I just don't have the emotional stamina to pretend to be friends in order to get something out of it. I'd rather pay full price than owe a favour for a discount, especially if such favours are "time spent with" because of the emotional stamina thing.
Funny thing I find about the "mutual interest friends" is that I don't have the depth of interest to discuss "thing" to the degree that these people do. I've actually found that entering a "mutual interest group", to me, ends up as a discouragement of pursuit of that interest, lest I end up as deeply embedded in the rabbit hole as they.
I think I may be an arsehole (polite, but arsehole nonetheless). But I know enough compatible folks that I'm happy where I've landed. And unnecessary drama is a path to an early grave and an unsatisfying, unsatisfied life.
I couldn't relate to any one of those fully. Boy is there a difference in culture!
For us friends are not for helping when needed, networking, getting jobs for us or what not. In most cases of 'friends', its a non-transactional relationship. You just like talking to them, spending time with them. Yes, there are other 'acquaintances' for other things.
Not sure if we need to make it so complicated.
I'm probably from a similar culture and friendship here means a very close personal relationship similar to, or in some cases even stronger than, familial relationships. I feel that the original post's concept of friendship is very shallow compared to that. Friendship in my culture transcends such categorization.
Not really. I kinda feel like the categorization contains group of people you are social with, but does not have actual category for a "real friend". These are all groups of acquittances, people you are polite to who are polite to you back. Mutual interest friends sounds to be activity related acquittances. Once you are not in activity, neither of us cares. Fun friend is person you to go be drunk with or on trip with.
But person I actually trust and can talk about more private issues openly, someone that may be fun or not but I feel deeper non-romantic connection to seems to be missing.
There obviously are levels to being intimate. You can be more intimate with someone than with someone else. It also varies with time.
A better way to look at those categories is that they are dominant archetypes (like eigenvectors) that are variably fractionally fulfilled by each relationship. The archetypes are "real" in the sense that they accurately describe/compress reality, much like many datasets can be quite accurately compressed down to some major eigenvectors.
The description still does not really fit what I have in mind.
And backstage intimate is horrible term too. My friends are not intimate nor backstage. Intimate is something else entirely, it does not fit the relationship at all. I talk more openly with them, but I am not intimate in emotional sense with them at all.
The backstage part have similar issues. In what sense are they backstage?
Yes, I started to actively search for that category: People you REALLY like to spend time with, people you are happy when they write you and people that are happy when they write you: Deep connection friends, soulmate(s) (friends), "chosen family", maybe even those that would donate one of their kidneys for you!
This subjective drivel must have been written by someone who does not have those kinds of friends and does not understand them. I would categorise friends and acquaintances completely differently.
> You just like talking to them, spending time with them.
The author does not use a single word of emotion to describe what he calls "backstage intimates", so I reject this label for the kind of friendships I talk about. I would primarily describe them based on emotions! Intimacy, platonic love, deep appreciation, being confidents!
The greek storge variant of love comes closest to what I am talking about. I have three friends like that, I trust them on a deep level, we often talk about our deepest feelings, in complex ways they love me and I love them. I even share physical closeness with them, when we meet we are as close as a long distance couple that just met again in real life. With two of them I occasionally have sex when we see each other, opposed to my FWB I do not have a connection to beyond sex. They are beacons of light in my dark life and among the most valuable things I have.
The semantics aren't too important to me, but my gut says no: What else than an extension of platonic love is it, if you can combine and the trust and affection it creates with mutual physical attraction that culminates in sexual relations?
This was a common criticism in my circles (friends, work colleagues, acquaintances in tech meetups) in the mid-to-late 00s with Facebook: They called all contacts "friends" and in German that really sounded off to many of us. You wouldn't be "friends" with your relatives or boss or colleague at work, for example, those are entirely different kind of relationships. We assumed that this was a badly translated Americanism.
Google Plus and it's "circles" of contacts was a better design in that regard.
For me a real friend is somebody you can do important things together with, where trust is needed. I've never had a huge need for idle conversation. Life is in action. But people have unnecessarily limited themselves to think they are only allowed to do important things within their day job.
I think most real friendships among adults last when people also do business, projects and networking together. Just sitting and reminiscing on old memories, gossiping, or commenting on unimportant things gets old quick.
Wtf is wrong with sociologists, why must everything be so transactional?
I just fucking like being with my friends. It brings me joy. Utter joy: no fun, no career advancement, no playing tennis, no life advice, no social cohesion. Of course I also do all these things, but they're more an excuse to be together than the other way around. I don't know, hormones maybe?
Fun implies some utility. I like being around the friend because we’re doing fun stuff, like partying or joking around.
Joy means that whatever we do, I am simply happier because I am with the person. We could be doing non-fun stuff, like filing boring paperwork or the friend could be visiting me in the hospital cause I broke my leg, and I am in a lot of pain, but the mere presence of the person brings me joy.
A naive top of my head explanation: joy seems like something that’s been developed from a friendship that could’ve been roughly labeled by one/multiple of author’s categories. Basically, you feel joy only because you’ve spent time gossiping, confiding, having fun together (etc.) in the past, and at those stages, the relationship would be frameable by some of these categories
Another argument to be made is that, let’s say after having a positive shrooms trip, many people feel joy being with other people even strangers. But that kind of joy doesn’t seem to be a significant sociological force in the western society, which is here being examined
Time is a finite commodity with opportunity-cost and we choose to spend our time in someone else's company because we derive benefit, educational, political or even emotional.
I can see such exchanges as more or less subtle but not devoid of bidirectional benefits conferred. Indeed when it's converted all in one direction, its reason enough to decommission that friendship.
I struggle to envision a friendship that is absent of beneficial exchange or as you put it, non transactional. Can you describe the qualities ofsuch non transactional relationships in which no benefits are exchanged for your time?
The idea that people function as rational agents always acting to optimize their self interests is an idea that I think was developed by economists because it helped explain how markets work and made it possible to solve the price-setting problem mathematically using game theory. It has then spilt over into other fields of study such as sociology.
But why did humanity wait until the 1980s to understand that all humans always act in their self interest? Because it is simply not true. People don't constantly reassess whether such or such friendship is a net positive or a net negative. And people don't even have a grid to actually measure what "positive" mean in that context.
The issue is that you can always find a way to derive a selfless action into something self-beneficial. Warren Buffet asking for more taxes is acting in his self interest because it makes him look good and feel all warm inside?
So whatever example I give to answer your question, you'll always be able to find some form of transactional reason that explains why people do things.
If I tell you that some people willfully remain in abusive relationships, you're going to answer something like: it's because they find something in the relationship that is soothing some childhood trauma, and so their self-interest unconscious calculation is that it's better for them to stay in the abusive relationship than to leave.
But that's just taking the whole problem from the wrong end. That's stating that the model of self-interest is universal, and then shoe-horning every human behavior into that model, whether it makes sense or not. So sociologists ask themselves: "mmmmh what self-interest does a person have in going to a friend's funeral", "well surely there is some social benefit or emotional benefit from doing so". So basically, they attribute "unexplainable transactional calculations" to unmeasurable quantities like "social or emotional benefit".
Look, TFA is showing a model. Not the model. A model.
I can apply a transactional lens just to see whether it helps me to "understand" (in fact: to predict) something novel about the situation. If it checks out, none of your arguments matter. For a model, that's as good as it can get.
It's important to have more than one tool in your toolbox and to practice their flexible use. Advertising any model as "true" counteracts that - the net effect is harmful, even when the model is otherwise decent.
psychology is vast, and you might have a very deep socio-affective brain, which means their presence is what matters, the rest is secondary
which is great, i stopped feeling like this in 1994, and life carried me into transactional / protocolized social life (which I don't like) .. maybe sociologist live too much in the land of stats
I’m a bit surprised by the description of sociable acquaintances. I can’t imagine going out of my way to spend time with people who aren’t really my friends just for social convention. Especially things like going to their weddings!
Now it’s one thing if they are your partners friend since that is a friend of a friend. But if it is someone you know but don’t actually like enough to elevate to full friend status, I don’t get it.
That’s probably just me being a big introvert though. The idea of willingly going out and being around people I have to fake laugh with is not my idea of a good time.
Imagine you're thinking of moving to a different country, but it is actually a difficult decision, where not only you but other people will be affected, some of them negatively. Now consider all the people at work from whom you'd immediately accept an invitation to a lunch/coffee. Are all of those people "close enough" for you to disclose your intention and ask for advice? Those that aren't are approximately the "sociable acquaintances".
Sociable acquaintances require almost no trust from each other, beyond believing that the other person is not psychotic, or a dangerous sociopath, or something of this sort.
Oh no, I’m not disputing the existence or value of having acquaintances. But rather I can’t imagine doing the level of socializing with them as described by the post.
It's required if you have a middle-manager-like job. Especially in a smaller company, you have to know (in this way) a whole lot of people, so that they pick up the phone if you call them.
Ha, lovely joke, but indeed friends with benefits are clearly in the "pleasure" file. Ancient Greeks seem to have been expert at friends with benefits.
Yeah, yeah. You got me.
But I was kinda going for an unspoken point. Which man is sicker: One who needs to classify friendships as either pleasure or utility? Or one who admits a certain utility to pleasure, and a certain pleasure to utility?
And saying it was accidental in either case is quite a sophisticated little excuse...
Aristotle would have been using "accidental" as opposed to "essential". Both used slightly differently to today's common usage. Essential being of the essence of a thing, i.e. it could not be that thing without it. Accidental being non-essential, i.e. it can be itself without that thing`[0].
It's not clear how a friendship can be essential though. Of what is the friendship essential? Or is it more like a friendship that fits the platonic form of a friendship.
edit: I do realise that your comment was a joke, and doesn't deserve to be "uhm actuallied", but I've personally always found the essential vs accidental usage to be very useful and interesting :)
Hah... that's fascinating (I by no means mind having a joke turn into a real dialogue, and this is good stuff). So, it's interesting to apply this ancient pre-Abrahamic-moralizing, Platonic division between extrinsic/intrinsic, deduction/induction to modern friendships. All of us westerners still have 19th C. romantic biases that make it hard to admit if a romance serves a purpose, that might block us from being honest with ourselves. Then again, we're not so different. Essential is that love who is so entangled with your life that you make every decision together. Aristotle might've well thought his relationship with a 12 year old slave boy defined the essence in "essential". So, no one's perfect, but it's still possible to guess the meaning.
We might do well to begin sorting our relationships again by those which possess intrinsic meaning and the others which don't.
Friends that combine pleasure and utility are so few in a lifetime we established cultural norm to mark them with rings and loudly announce the pairing to the entirety of the town one resides, or smth.
I'd say marriage is a doggedly hopeful way to make someone please you, be useful, and act like they're friendly, under color of law, but it rarely captures the actual thing you imagine it's enshrining.
funny little story.
I changed my phone number a few years back. But a friend of mine didn't get the memo. He's a really foodie guy who loves eating breakfast in off the map diners, and tacos from obscure food trucks. He sends like 3-6 photos per day of food he's eating.
Anyway, I hadn't heard from him in a couple months, but we ended up in Vegas at the same time with some mutual friends. And I was like, hey, I haven't heard from you in months. He was like, "I thought it was really rude of you to tell me to stop sending you my breakfast photos".
We put it together eventually that he had been sending his breakfast photos for TWO MONTHS to some new guy with my old cellphone number, before that guy was finally like "shut the fuck up and stop sending me pictures of your food".
Funny side story about that guy (let's call him Bo). My brother is germaphobic and only eats tortilla chips up to where his fingers touched them, then makes a pile of tiny finger-touched corners of tortilla chips on a little napkin. Bo sits down at the bar and unconsciously just starts munching these tiny little corners for awhile, then goes, "where did you get these mini chips?" and watches in horror as my brother discards another one.
I'm not sure how this relates to the original conversation about friends, but I'm sure it does somehow.
Whether in the proper spirit of HN or not, I very much appreciated both stories. Made me glad I posted my attempted humorous comment. Thank you :)
> watches in horror as my brother discards another one.
Love it.
Edited to add after further thought, bringing it back into relevance with the topic:
To steal a Hunter S. Thompson quote, the "too weird to live, too rare to die" friend: someone that just seems to attract unusual experiences and has great value merely for the volume of weird life stories they're happy to share and also somehow continue to collect.
Inevitably overlaps with other categories, but also absolutely require a category of their own.
I believe that I fit into this category for some of my more "vanilla" acquaintances (and even some family members).
The "highest order" in this case meaning of virtue. So three kinds of "friendship" (philia): of pleasure, of utility, of virtue (moral goodness). When we think of "real friendship" we're thinking of the third kind.
I’m not sure the distinction between fun friends and mutual interest friends makes sense to me.
“Fun friends are noisy, carousing, extroverts; mutual-interest friends are generally rather quiet and sedentary.”
It seems to me like from the definition of fun friends that they could be considered mutual interest friends where the mutual interest is in partying or drinking or whatever.
The article mentions mutual interest could be a subtype of fun, but they wanted to make a distinction between when getting together is the goal and when there's another objective beyond that.
For example with drinking, they seem to think there's enough of a difference between the friends that get together to have a few drinks and the friends that get together to do a wine tasting focused on a region of France.
> When people say “It’s a matter of principle!” they are usually doing something self-destructive.
Oof. That's an interesting perspective on some of the choices I've made in the past. If no other choice, then the choice to use Free Software as much as possible, even when it is awkward to do so, might surely count.
I note that the author does include the escape clause of "usually", so they're not claiming it as a universal. It is an interesting perspective to consider though. (Also, I've not caused any rifts with family members over principle, so at least I have that in my favour.)
> When people say “It’s a matter of principle!” they are usually doing something self-destructive.
Ah, one of these deep thoughts... [citation needed].
"Self-destructive" is an emotionally-loaded term. Did you literally destruct yourself by using FOSS? How about an alternate phrasing: when people say “It’s a matter of principle!” they are usually sacrificing something. Mundane, eh?
This is very similar to Aristotle's views on friendship in Nichomachean Ethics.
He has a final category of 'true friend' that refer to someone who reflects part of your being back at you. Given that this is possible with another person he is able to resolve the question of "why should we behave morally?" by pointing out that every other human is potentially a true friend who may instantiate an aspect of you. In this case acting without considering the interests of others is acting against your own interests.
This article seems to stretch the meaning of friend quite a bit beyond my comfort zone, but I believe that may just be me.
Mutual interest friends border on what I'd call more acquaintances.
But also, who drops a HTTP link in 2023? You just rawdogged my browser, bro.
The site is also being served over HTTPS for those who haven't yet partaken.
I didn't find the categorization of friendships offered by the article all that useful. It seems far too simplistic and superficial to be the state-of-the-art in sociology: terms like trust, confidence, outgroup, ingroup seem curiously absent. But I could easily be wrong about that, as I don't know much about sociology in the first place.
But I do know a few things about linguistics, and I'm well aware that the oldest meaning of friend wasn't "ally" in Rome. Amicus means "loved one", and its application to allies is a mere Lakoffian metaphor, and by no means, as claimed by the article, the origin of the concept.
While recognizing the author's expertise in sociology, when I take into account Gell-Mann amnesia, I was much less able to take his explanations seriously after that introduction. The writing style didn't help either: it imitates that genre of 2010s SAT essays where the student has to demonstrate familiarity with the Western canon by strenously relating random events in books they read to inane questions such as "Are people defined by their occupations?"
> All sorts of shared interests can be the Cultural Capital for this kind of friendship.
I feel like my education was all about accumulation and allocation of financial capital, cause I guess its the easiest thing to measure and track. Things like Cultural and Social Capital were things I sort of stumbled upon much later in life.
I don't agree. I feel like my education, starting in pre-school, was all about the cultural/social aspect with some scholastic curriculum thrown in. I didn't understand that at the time, and that reflects the broken culture in my family. My mom was somewhat of a nerd, probably on the autism spectrum, and my dad was a cynical dork. Neither one passed on an appreciation for social connections or conventions. But I digress. School was all about social connections, it's just not something you're specifically instructed on or tested for.
For me, good friends or just 'friends' have all these qualities: they are allies, they are backstage intimates, they are fun, they share mutual interests with me. Not just some. I don't consider sociable acquaintances as friends.
"Working-class and lower-middle class people tend to be very fun-oriented when they are young, but age out of it more quickly, into passive TV watching and its surrogates"
What about friends that you love? Friends that might as well be family or even might be better than family, because you chose each other? A platonic love.
I think everyone has their own definition of what a friend is for them and how they, mentally, acknowledge some people as friends and others as acquaintances.
I don’t have any friends of any type, and have no memory of my childhood, so I don’t know if I ever had imaginary friends. Perhaps they fit those categories.
Military childhood, being moved around from pillar to post, then pretty much a university life after that.
Cant say I totally agree with his observation, because there was not one mention of the word trust. Sure it could be implied by virtue of discussing the topic of friends, but its just an observation and categorisation, which is simplistic at best.
Trust is something that happens over time, much like in a relationship, and with any sort of friendship, there needs to be trust. I can only assume from his military childhood and university movements, that his friendships perhaps dont have the depth of trust others seek or have. The problem with being too trusting and thus naive, is you become exploited whilst people masquarade as friends, and only once they have what they want from you, you see that friendship dissipate into nothing.
I think it goes down to what you'd be willing to sacrifice for them. There are a few people in this life I know I'd jump in front of a bus for. I don't actually need to know that they'd do the same for me, but I know it anyway. Trust is what you give, not what you get. What I'm willing to give when I don't want to give it. That's the meter, for me, of a friendship.
